


what you had, what you lost

by weasleytook



Category: Push (2009), Revenge (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Flashbacks, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-01
Updated: 2016-10-01
Packaged: 2018-08-18 20:10:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8174503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weasleytook/pseuds/weasleytook
Summary: Emily Thorne gets a very surprising knock on her door, from Nick Gant and Cassie Holmes.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [galfridian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/galfridian/gifts).



> Well. This happened.
> 
> Thankfully, dear recipient, I know you love me despite my many flaws. ;)

Cassie stares out the passenger side window of their rented car for a long while: worried, but hopeful that this is their shot to finally stop running. She turns her gaze back to Nick and asks, “Who is this girl anyway? Besides being one of us, you haven’t told me anything else."

 

“I knew her when we were teenagers, before I even knew Kira. She’s the best Pusher I’ve ever seen.”

 

“Better than Kira?”

 

Nick laughs softly, “She makes Kira look like kindergarten. Most people like us don’t even know she exists, because _she_ pushed them to forget.”

 

Cassie’s both impressed and a little bit scared. Kira had gone rogue on them more than once, so she understood what this Emily girl could be capable of. “If she’s been hidden from Division for this long, how do you know she’ll help us?”

 

Nick pulls up to the expensive house on the beach and shuts off the car before he answers, “Because we have something she desperately needs.”

 

They walk together to the front door where Nick knocks firmly, listening as footsteps head towards the door. A woman’s voice shouts back at them, “Go away!”

 

Nick sighs and then shouts back, “You know I could unlock this door myself and just come in, but I won’t. And I know I’m the last person you want to see, but I swear to you on my father, you won’t regret opening that door.”

 

Emily opens the door and it’s the girl from Cassie’s visions, but a lot angrier than Cassie ever saw her. She only spares a quick glance at Cassie before glaring back at Nick. “I don’t know how you found me. I did everything I could to make sure no one from Division would ever find me again.”

 

Cassie grins and points at herself. “Watcher.”

 

Her expression softens to one of vague recognition. “You must be Sarah’s kid, right? What are you, like nineteen now?”

 

Cassie nods and then nudges Nick with her elbow, hoping the mention of her mom has softened her up enough to let them in. Nick pulls the flash drive out of his pocket and holds it up in front of his face. “Want to know how to take down both Division and the people who put your father away all at the same time? Then let us in Please, Emily, we can help each other. You know me, and you know I would never put you at risk if it wasn’t important.”

 

She frowns and looks as if she’s thinking it over and Cassie feels like she’s about to burst while she waits. Emily finally opens the door wider and ushers them in. “If you two found me, then there’s a chance Division will too. Might as well see what you’ve got.”

 

She shuts the door behind them and motions towards the flash drive. “What is this?”

 

“Every file you’ll ever need to dismantle both Division and the Graysons.”

 

“And how did _you_ get your hands on this?”

 

She asks it in a way that makes Cassie think she’s insulting Nick’s abilities, so she interjects, “You’re not the only one with skills.”

 

Emily smiles, but just slightly. “Last time I saw Nick, I was.”

 

“I wasn’t talking about Nick.”

 

Nick looks vaguely insulted but says nothing, because in this case, she’s not wrong. He was just the brawn in this particular heist, Cassie and Kira were the architects of the plan.

 

Emily snatches the drive out of his hand and looks at it for a moment before asking, “What’s the catch?”

 

Nick answers, “Whatever comes of this, Cassie and I have to be in on it. We’ve – we’ve lost too much to stop now.”

 

It’s just a brief touch, but his hand goes to Cassie’s elbow, his thumb stroking it for just a second, a quick moment of comfort that looks more instinctual than deliberate. It does not go unnoticed by Emily, who gives them a brief nod before Nick continues, “Secondly, you wouldn’t happen to know a really good hacker, would you?”

 

Emily grins and walks to the kitchen counter to grab her phone. “Oh, I have a guy.”

 

 

***

 

 

_1992_

 

 

They don’t take her to Division right away. Maybe they don’t know she’s a Pusher, because it takes her six months after her father is arrested for Amanda to discover it herself. There’s always a slight buzzing feeling in her brain when it happens, and it never happened before she was taken away from her father. She wonders if it’s because she didn’t need it then.

 

She starts to figure out what it is when she jokingly tells another kid in the orphanage to shut up, and he doesn’t say a word for five days. Amanda drags him to a corner away from prying ears and pushes him to speak, undoing her previous work. She then tests out a few more tricks like making him hop on one foot and quack like a duck before telling him to forget all of it.

 

Amanda makes a few attempts at getting the adults around her to help her dad, but she doesn’t have full control of her abilities yet and changing the minds of adults is a lot different than making a ten-year-old quack.

 

Division finds her a few months after that and takes her out of the system. She gets excited at the promise of harnessing her powers with them, but quickly learns she’s only traded one rotten system for another.

 

 

***

 

 

_1998_

 

 

Amanda is fourteen when she figures out that they’re more scared of her than she is of them. They look at her differently than they do the other test subjects, and they only let certain members of Division, usually other Pushers, deal with her on a one-on-one basis.

 

The torture is never physical, but that’s no comfort to her. The tests she is put through, almost daily, and the ways they force her to test her abilities are worse than any physical pain. She doesn’t want to hurt or kill people, but she begins to understand that’s what they’re aiming for, to turn her into a weapon.

 

She isn’t allowed to socialize much with the others who pass through, but she does bond with Sarah Holmes, a Watcher with a young daughter, Cassie, that Division allows her to see on weekends. Whenever Amanda asks about Cassie’s father, Sarah always clams up, claiming that it’s better for him that he’s not in the picture.

 

Sarah promises her she’ll get out of there someday and when Amanda asks if she’ll see her father again, Sarah has no clear answers for her.

 

She begs the Division agents she deals with for some sort of contact with her father, but they allow nothing, only giving her assurances that he is alive and well, despite his imprisonment.

 

When she starts to get stubborn and powerful enough to resist Pushers older than her, they don’t threaten her with physical pain, they threaten to hurt or kill her father. She makes a vow to become the weapon they’re looking for, but only so she can use her power against them.

 

 

***

 

 

_2000_

Amanda spends the next two years turning herself into a virus, slowly infecting the minds of every person she meets. It’s never blatant or forceful, because she’s terrified of what Division will do to her if they figure it out, so she learns how to be patient. She also becomes their star pupil, so she can apply everything they want her to do with her powers to her escape plan.

 

She learns how to plant false memories, to construct events that never happened and make them so real, no one would ever question it. Amanda also learns a skill that’s similar to hypnosis, pushing everyone around her to respond to an audio cue.

 

The day before she enacts her plan, Sarah slips a piece of paper into her hands. “You’ll need this when you’re on the outside.”

 

She opens it up and it’s a name, Nolan Ross, and an address in Manhattan. “I don’t understand.”

 

“You’ll need to find him someday, not right away, but you’ll know when. You can trust him. Promise me you’ll find him.”

 

Amanda is unsure, but Sarah is the best Watcher that anyone has ever known, so she agrees. “I promise. Just promise me you’ll take your girl and get as far away from Division as you can.”

 

“They’ll find me again,” Sarah says with a certainty that Amanda has grown accustomed to from hanging out with a woman who sees the future.

 

“Then don’t slow down.” It’s meant seriously, but both of them laugh at how silly it sounds. She wishes she could erase Sarah from the minds of everyone in Division, but Division is spread too far and wide for her to even attempt it. She can only get to those who are at this facility, and all that will do is give them a head start.

 

The next night, she pushes the guard that patrols outside of her room to take her to system control. It’s taken her six months to get him completely under her thumb and to do it without his bosses noticing. The major flaw in Division has always been that you can only hold on to people with powers for so long before they escape, especially if they happen to be a Pusher. The only reason Amanda has stayed so long is she wanted to do everything she could to make sure she only had to escape them once.

 

They head to the control room where she pushes the guard there to set off the alarms. That’s the audio cue she’s been programming into people’s minds as the trigger for months. Doors get unlocked, subjects get unshackled and data gets destroyed, all because that’s how she planned it.

 

She knows Amanda Clarke won’t be forgotten by everyone attached to Division, nor will anyone else she’s setting free tonight. But at least it will give them all a head start and a chance, however slim, at a life away from Division.

 

Once she’s sure everyone is out of the building, she gives one last direction to the staff gathered at the front doors: to burn it all down and forget they ever knew her.

 

She only gets a glimpse of Sarah, running through the woods with a small girl at her side, and she breathes a sigh of relief that they’re together again.

 

Amanda takes the money she stole from the guards and on the first bus out of town, which happens to be doing to Boston. When the clerk asks her name, she has a brief memory of a girl she met in the orphanage before Division took her and sputters out, “Emily Thorne.”

 

 

***

 

 

_2002_

 

 

Boston is where she meets Nick, another teenager wandering from place to place just like her, and she almost immediately figures out he’s a Mover. It takes her a lot longer to trust him enough to reveal what she is. It’s nice to be around someone who understands what she’s gone through, and who has also lost everything because of Division. She also figures even if he does make a move to betray her, she’s a lot more powerful than she is and could stop it before the damage is done.

 

He doesn’t betray her though. He may be sarcastic, and sometimes irresponsible, and not so great with his powers, but he’s a good guy through and through. They become friends, and a little more, but they’re still just kids so it never gets too serious.

 

She thinks every day about trying to visit her father, but they keep the visitors list restricted and a girl showing up out of nowhere that just happens to be Amanda’s age would be too suspicious.

 

It all becomes moot anyway when she turns on the TV in her dingy little apartment to find out that David Clarke is dead. It’s a huge news story, an infamous terrorist is murdered in prison, so it dominates the news cycle. Emily watches, transfixed, and reaches for the phone to call Nick to come over. She doesn’t cry until he gets there, and when she does, it’s the kind of sobs that shake her entire body. Nick holds her until she finally wears herself out and falls asleep.

 

She wakes up the next morning and he’s still beside her on the couch, so she quietly slips away so as not to disturb him. Emily begins digging in the bottom drawer of the dresser until she finds a wrinkled piece of paper underneath a pile of socks.

 

When Nick wakes up, she’s sitting in a chair near him and she smiles as she says, “I’ve got to leave.”

 

“Wait… what? Now?”

 

“Sarah told me I’d know when it was time, and I think now feels right.”

 

He wipes the sleep from his eyes and looks at her in confusion. “Time for what?”

 

“Time to meet Nolan Ross.”

 

 

***

 

 

_2002 – a few weeks later_

 

 

Nick moves on to somewhere else, he doesn’t tell her where, and part of her is tempted to make him forget her entirely, but for some reason, she doesn’t.

 

Emily arrives in Manhattan a few days after they say goodbye, but doesn’t go to Nolan right away. She researches him, finds out he’s a young tech genius who just so happened to hit the jackpot with his latest invention. Emily stands outside his apartment for a couple days to watch him and eventually determines that he doesn’t look like he’s out to murder anyone or send her back to Division.

 

When she finally gets the courage up to go knock on his door, he opens it immediately and doesn’t say anything, just stares at her face for what feels like a week. It’s starting to edge right up to creepy when he finally opens his mouth, and very softly says, “Amanda.”

 

She puts her hand up to his mouth and shushes him. “It’s Emily now, and how the hell did you know?”

 

He moves her hand away and then pulls her inside the apartment. “How did _you_ know where to find me?”

 

Emily shuts the door behind her and turns back to him. “How much time do you have? Because it’s a very long story.”

 

“I’ve been waiting to meet you for a long time, so take all the time you need.”

 

She makes him go first, and he explains exactly how he knew David and how he recognized her, then goes into another room for a moment before returning with a wooden box. It has the double infinity symbol carved on it, the same one her dad carved at the beach house and the same one she got tattooed on her wrist when she escaped Division. It’s filled with letters and diaries that David wrote for her, telling her everything she never got to learn from him.

 

It takes her some time to go through it, reading a few of the letters and skimming the journals before she decides to test Nolan. She turns to him and her eyes go black as she says, “Whatever I ask you in the next two minutes, you will answer without reservation and one-hundred-percent truthfully.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Are you completely loyal to David Clarke?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Would you ever betray me?”

 

“Of course not.”

 

“And whatever I tell you tonight, you’ll never tell another living soul. Correct?”

 

“It stays between us. Forever.”

 

Her eyes go back to their normal brown color and she gives him a reassuring smile. “Good.”

 

Nolan looks confused, which the usual side effect of a tiny bit of mind control. “What just happened here?”

 

“That’s part of the secret I have to tell you.”

 

They talk all night, and she knows, deep down, even if she hadn’t done that test, she can trust him. Her father had often put his trust in the wrong people, the Graysons being the prime example of that, but Nolan hadn’t been a mistake.

 

 

***

 

 

“Jesus, Nick, do you make out with _every_ Pusher you ever met?”

 

Much to Emily’s surprise, that’s the first thing out of Cassie’s mouth as she finishes telling her a somewhat shortened version of her life story.

 

Nick casually shrugs and answers, “Nah. Not Carver.”

 

She laughs and then turns back to Emily, “So you knew my mom?”

 

“Yeah. Is she –“

 

Cassie shakes her head and answers, “I don’t know. Last I heard, she was still alive but pretty bad off so – I don’t know.”

 

“I’m sorry I didn’t do more for her. She was the one person who kept me sane while I was there.”

 

“You did plenty. And if your boyfriend over there can crack those files open, then you’re both my new heroes.”

 

Nolan’s head lifts up from the computer screen as he looks at Cassie with a head shake. “It’s not – we’re not –“

 

Cassie grins and says with great sarcasm, “Suuuuure, you’re not.”

 

Nick playfully kicks at her foot under the table, silencing her.

 

Emily emphatically, maybe _too_ emphatically based on Nolan’s reaction to it, insists, “We’re definitely not.”

 

Nolan quickly changes the subject by turning the laptop to face the rest of them. “While Ems was reading you her autobiography, the one non-superhuman in the room did this.”

 

Emily leans in first and stares at the screen in disbelief. “Nolan, did you have any idea?”

 

“The Conrad Grayson had ties to Division? No clue, but I’m not shocked.”

 

Cassie says, “We heard these rumors a while back, that Grayson had ties to Division, but we didn’t have the proof. I didn’t know why it was a big deal then, but Nick did. That’s why we worked so hard to get these files.”

 

Emily nods as understanding dawns on her, “Of course Conrad Grayson would want to find a way to weaponize people with abilities. Do you think he knew all along? That I was –“

 

Nick interjects, “Maybe he suspected it and that’s why he hired your dad to begin with. To keep an eye on you.”

 

Emily thinks about her mother and all of her issues. She’d never connected them to Division, but sometimes people with abilities were driven mad, either by their own powers or by Division, so maybe her mother had been a victim too.

 

She sighs and sits back down. “This is crazy. Every person who ever worked against my father – against me – it’s all connected.”

 

There’s a moment of quiet as it weighs on all of them. Cassie looks at her, firm in her intent, and asks, “So can we count you in?”

 

She also looks at Nolan and adds, “Both of you?”

 

Emily answers first, “Whatever it takes.”

 

Nolan nods as if they didn’t even need to ask and answers, “Welcome to the Hamptons.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> I know, I know, I know. It deserves like 10,000 more words and an actual plot, but since I know you and you know me (don't worry any strangers reading this, we didn't spoil the surprises, there are... reasons - which you will understand post-reveals), I figured you'd understand. Also, since we plan on knowing each other for the rest of our lives (and afterlife, when we go to that great fanfic writing heaven in the sky), you may eventually get to read those 10,000 words. And hopefully those words will be better than these words and with much more making out between our beloved ships.
> 
> Also, hope you didn't mind that hint of Emily/Nick. I CAN'T HELP MYSELF, THEY'RE SO PRETTY AND IT'S STEVE AND SHARON.
> 
> OKAY. I LOVE YOU. BYE.


End file.
